A reader sent along a note yesterday to warn me his machine picked up a virus infection from a page on CVG after following a link to there from here. I was skeptical this was the case on such a major site, so I visited the page to see what was up. A couple of minutes later I got an antivirus pop-up that started scanning, saying I was infected with a virus, except this was not actually from my AV software. I killed this with the task manager, and removed the infection using Malwarebytes, and restored my system from earlier in the day. I got some weird responses from my antivirus software, and the infection recurred, so I realized the AV software got hijacked along the way, and I repeated that procedure adding an uninstall and reinstall to the checklist, which seems to have cleared things up, ending my tale of woe.

You hear stories about being able to get a virus payload from visiting a page and not even clicking links, but I never knew anyone who actually experienced that (until now), with the weird part being I must have visited the site to post the link in the first place, without incident. Anyway, I notified CVG about the problem, and can only hope that not many of you were impacted by this, and if you were, you managed to clear things up without having to do anything drastic.

A couple of minutes later I got an antivirus pop-up that started scanning, saying I was infected with a virus, except this was not actually from my AV software.

This is the sort of malware we were telling you about a couple of weeks ago. (edit: I believe SOMEONE hinted that as long as your AV was up to date, you'd be fine, but I don't have the exact quote in front of me. ) It masquerades as some sort of AV software, but gives a false positive and will claim to fix your problems once you buy their software. It's digital extortion, basically: You pay them, and they (allegedly) go away.